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Maybe It's Not So Weird, After All Page 1 of 7 Jewishjournal.Com 12/7 JewishJournal.com Page 1 of 7 2007-12-07 Maybe it's not so weird, after all Reconsidering L.A.'s most controversial un-synagogue, the Kabbalah Centre By Rob Eshman, Editor-in-Chief The first time I visited the Kabbalah Centre, I thought it was weird. The congregants all wore white; the man on the bimah called out letters of the Hebrew alphabet ("Alef to bet to taph!"); the letters themselves were displayed in massive typeface on posters around the sanctuary. At certain moments in the Shabbat service, congregants circled their arms around their heads, like background dancers in a music video. And when the Torah came out, everybody held their hands out with their palms up, to, as the man standing next to me explained, "Receive the Light." My wife was there, too, upstairs in the women's section. She whispered something to a friend during the rabbi's sermon, and someone on the other side of her hissed, "Shh!" It was comedian Sandra Bernhard. Weird? It all seemed to me a cross between Scientology and Hebrew school -- full of glassy-eyed acolytes who knew more about multilevel marketing than Torah. Two weeks ago, I went back. And what I found and what I felt shocked me: I liked it. That's right, I liked it. I had been reading Jody Myers' (photo, left) just-released book, "Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America" (Praeger, $49.95), and it is the book's great strength that it forces a second and third look at a group that the great majority of mainstream Jewry finds suspicious, aberrant, fraudulent -- even dangerous. Myers is a professor of religious studies at Cal State Northridge. She is a scholar of orthodoxy and Zionism and a member of the Library Minyan at Temple Beth Am. In 1999, simply out of curiosity over the disdain her colleagues had leveled at the Centre, Myers walked for the first time into the Centre's attractive mission revival building on Robertson Boulevard, just south of Olympic Boulevard. This slim, diminutive and energetic academic decided then and there to use her sabbatical leave to research the Centre. She dug into archival, academic and religious research, interviewed numerous adherents and leaders and attended two 10-week courses the Centre offers, along with numerous Centre services and events. She devoted seven years to this work. The result is a rare example of open-minded, fair inquiry on a highly charged subject. She tracks http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/print.php?id=18596 12/7/2007 JewishJournal.com Page 2 of 7 the origin of the kabbalah movement, examines its main teachings, looks at the particular way Kabbalah Centre founder Rabbi Phillip Berg adapted those teachings to the American spiritual seeker, and she profiles Centre participants. She rarely lets the curious down -- though I suspect she will incense many readers who expect a mainstream indictment of this new form of Jewish expression. Instead, what she offers is a dispassionate analysis of the Kabbalah Centre as one of many new religious communities that have sprung up to satisfy the spiritual needs of a new generation. While most Jews and their rabbis disparage it, the Centre has grown worldwide to attract tens of thousands of participants by appealing to a generation that is suspicious of religious authority but hungry for tangible spiritual benefits. At a time when mainstream Jewish life is struggling and often failing to reinvigorate itself, the Kabbalah Centre has successfully taken, in Myers words, "an elitist and highly complex religious tradition limited to Jews" and modified it to appeal to a large, universal audience. It has done so without a dime of Jewish foundation grants or the benefit of focus groups, academic studies or any of the other hallmarks of 21st century institutional Jewish life, including membership dues or building campaigns. What Myers teaches, and what my visit last month taught me, is that instead of shunning the Centre, we ought to at least be studying it. The history of popular kabbalah in America doesn't begin with the Kabbalah Centre. It begins with http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/print.php?id=18596 12/7/2007 JewishJournal.com Page 3 of 7 a poor Polish Russian-born rabbi named Levi Krakovsky. As Myers tells it, Krakovsky followed his teacher, Yehuda Ashlag, to Palestine in 1922. Ashlag considered himself a disciple of the 16th-century kabbalistic master Isaac Luria, whose esoteric system of understanding the deeper, divine meanings of Torah influenced all future generations of Jewish and non-Jewish mystics. (In the age of "The Da Vinci Code," it's easy to see the appeal of a system of images and symbols that claims the Bible's real, true essence is "a code that establishes correspondences between the divine realm and the earthly realm.") On the death of his wife, Krakovsky placed his five children in a Jerusalem orphanage and came to New York to bring kabbalah to American Jewry. He failed. In post-war America, Jews wanted their religion staid, rational and practically Protestant. After two more marriages and an itinerant life spent carrying a satchel full of his English-language kabbalah book from Jewish community to community, Krakovsky -- a character in search of a Michael Chabon short story if ever there was one -- died in 1966. "Kabbalah destroys families," his son, Shlomo, said by way of eulogy. But before he died, Krakovsky met Shraga Feivel Gruberger in Brooklyn. Gruberger, born in Brooklyn in 1929, was ordained as an Orthodox rabbi at yeshiva TorahVaDat. Already successful in real estate and insurance, Gruberger decided to devote his life to spreading the understanding of Jewish mysticism he had received via the chain of Ashlag, Krakovsky and his colleague, Yehuda Brandwein -- kabbalah means "that which is received." It was the 1960s. Gruberger -- who by now went by the anglicized name of Phillip Berg -- promoted kabbalah as a way to keep young Jews out of the cults and away from non-Jewish religions that were sweeping them up. One study at the time found that Jews, just 2 percent to 3 percent of the American population, constituted between 6 and 20 percent of the membership of radical new religions. Berg, Myers writes, wanted to "show alienated and spiritually hungry Jews that their own religious heritage contained everything they needed for fulfillment." Berg's genius was in making something that was dense and esoteric into something highly accessible. What Ashlag wanted to teach to all Orthodox Jews, what his disciple Krakovsky wanted to teach to all Jews, Berg wanted to teach to all -- period. And his success is inarguable. Berg opened the first Centre in Toronto in 1988 (hence the spelling of Centre). There are now 26 Centres around the world and dozens of study groups. The Centre's Web site and marketing machine are arguably the most sophisticated of any Jewish organization, even one that denies it is Jewish. Go into any bookstore and books on kabbalah and mysticism dominate the new releases, just as kabbalah classes proliferate at synagogues and JCCs. How did Berg do this? At root, he offered an easy-to-grasp mysticism, a mysticism with handles. Take God. The Kabbalah Centre God is not an angry old man on a throne. "The picture of God [presented by the Kabbalah Centre] is, for many people, quite unlike the conventional one," Myers writes, "and they welcome it." The Kabbalah Centre God is like light, "a sharing good power ... often called simply, 'the Light.'" "The Light is warm, life giving, loving and completely and utterly devoted to fulfilling all the needs of the recipients of its glow. God desires only to share and never to withhold Light." If the Light is yours for the receiving, that great bugaboo of organized religion -- compulsion -- falls away. As Myers points out, at the Kabbalah Centre, there is no compulsion. In Berg's worldview, the Torah's directives -- mitzvot -- "are not mandates but suggestions." http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/print.php?id=18596 12/7/2007 JewishJournal.com Page 4 of 7 Kabbalah Centre adherents can -- and many do -- follow traditional mitzvot: keeping kosher, keeping the Sabbath. The more you follow, the more you let "the Light" shine in. But no one is pushed or made to feel compelled to do more than he or she desires. Where it gets weird is when Berg asserts that people's misdeeds in past lives, including their lack of kabbalah study, cause illness and misfortune in this lifetime. That explains how Berg could tell the mother of a young boy gravely ill with leukemia that the disease is a result of something from the boy's past life. And it explains how Berg could continue to teach that Sephardic Jews were not destroyed in the Holocaust because they hadn't abandoned kabbalah as the Ashkenazim had (in fact, Sephardic Jews were slaughtered). "Jewish persecution occurs when the Jews are receiving rather than giving," Myers writes in summarizing Berg's lesson. "This applies to the Holocaust, as well." The theology continues to be, to my mind, loopy, or at least unsatisfying. But Myers does an entirely admirable job of laying it out clearly and dispassionately. And, she points out, few religious thought systems have a lock on logic or consistency. The classes and teachings of the Centre resonate among boomer and post-boomer religious seekers not because they answer every big question with perfect sense (by the way, which Jewish movement can claim that?), but because they address central concerns about healing and self- fulfillment. The Centre teaches that our human desires or our reactions to life's challenges often block the Light.
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